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Preexisting knowledge versus on-line learning: what do young infants really know about spatial location?
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Preexisting knowledge versus on-line learning: what do young infants really know about spatial location?

Nora S Newcombe, Julia Sluzenski and Janellen Huttenlocher
Psychological science, v 16(3)
Mar 2005
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.00807.x
PMID: 15733203

Abstract

Attention Discrimination Learning Female Fixation, Ocular Habituation, Psychophysiologic Humans Infant Knowledge Learning Male Mental Recall Orientation Pattern Recognition, Visual Psychology, Child Set (Psychology) Space Perception
Contemporary knowledge of infant cognition relies heavily on violation-of-expectation experiments. However, there are two ways to conceptualize what occurs in such studies. Babies may react to anomalous test events because of preexisting world knowledge. Alternatively, they may react because they have learned about events during the familiarization period. One way to distinguish these possibilities is to contrast familiarization with everyday versus anomalous events. In the studies we report here, we used this method to probe the nature of 5-month-olds' expectations about the locations of objects hidden in sand and later revealed. In Experiment 1, infants who initially saw everyday events did react to anomalous ones, as found previously, whereas infants who initially saw anomalous events did not react to everyday events. In Experiment 2, two alternative explanations of this pattern were ruled out. We conclude that by the age of 5 months, infants have expectations regarding the location of objects in continuous space.

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32 citations in Web of Science
34 citations in Scopus

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
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